It Was Not Mental Illness - It Was Right-Wing Hate

The following is just part of an excellent op-ed by Brian Broome in The Washington Post:

You know who will get the blame for Colorado Springs, right? Each time these things happen, the right-wing go-to is to blame “mental illness.” That’s what some thought drove Robert Bowers to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh to kill 11 human beings. That’s what others believed made Dylann Roof stroll into a Black church in Charleston, S.C., to murder nine human beings. And, sooner or later, conservatives will say it was “mental illness” that drove this newest killer of the marginalized to commit the latest atrocity.

But are we ever going to ask why so many supposedly mentally ill people seem to carry right-wing talking points along with their AR-15s?

It’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares. And here’s the bonus for the instigators: The bottomless list of homophobes and transphobes on the right don’t need to throw the rock and then hide their hands. Instead, they use someone else’s hands entirely. After ginning up hatred for a particular community through fear, lies and conspiracies, all they have to do is sit back and wait for someone to do their work for them. . . .

Already, queer people feel less safe in the United States now. I guarantee that those spaces where we feel at home in the world, the bars, the coffee shops, the clubs, will be emptier this weekend. The writer bell hooks once described queerness as “being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Hostility to that experience was on full display in Colorado, but it originates with people who have large platforms and loud microphones.

Nothing in politics is as effective as fear. And conservatives know exactly how to weaponize it. The conservative mind is more concerned that a drag queen is entering a classroom to read a story to children than a gunman is entering a classroom to shoot them. And I will never understand that.